🎓 Caflou Project Management Academy

📐 What are the principles of good project management?

The principles of good project management presented here are the foundations on which good project management practice is built. Following these principles is a necessary condition for successful project management. Successful project management is a prerequisite for sponsors, clients, customers and other parties involved to gain value from project outputs.

👥 Roles and responsibilities in the project 

One of the principles of project management is that the project must have clear roles and responsibilities. This article covers the roles and responsibilities of the key stakeholders that are part of every project. If there are other stakeholders in the project, their roles and responsibilities also need to be clearly defined.

🔑 6 Key Elements of Successful Project Cost Management for Small Businesses 

Are you struggling to complete your projects successfully while juggling managing resources, activities, deadlines, and unexpected obstacles? If you add the pressure of planning and tracking expenses and keeping within tight budgets, project management can get quite an overwhelming task to do irrespective of the type and size of the project. In fact, up to three-fourths of projects end up well beyond the set budget constraints and more than a half of managers consider cost overruns as the main reason for project failure. How can you prevent such unforeseen bloated costs and keep your project on track?

👩🏻‍💻 11 Project Management Trends for Small Businesses

Did you know that underestimating project management results in an average of 67% more project failures? What’s more, it has become one of the four top priorities of organizations, along with delivering customer value, organizational flexibility, and investing in technology.

Achieve your project goals on time and within the determined budgets with these hot project management trends for small businesses. Here’s how.

🖐️ 5 Basic Rules to Deliver Successful Projects for Small Businesses

Managing projects can be an overwhelming and tedious process – particularly so when you’re running a small business with limited human and material resources. 

And yet, there is a light in the tunnel – recent project management statistics indicate that four in ten businesses mostly or always manage to deliver successful projects bringing full benefits, and almost half of surveyed organizations report having a track record of winning project execution.

Ready to learn the ropes of effective project management? Let’s dive right in with our first rule…

💻 When is Project Management Software a Must?

Are you using different tools – including spreadsheets, boards, and file management systems – to plan projects, manage team members, allocate resources, and track progress? Is managing projects becoming a chore, and is your team’s productivity suffering?

If so, you might need to invest in project management software. This software helps you manage projects throughout their lifecycle and helps team members collaborate to meet shared goals.

In this article, we’ll explore six tell-tale signs that project management software is necessary for your team. But first, let’s see what these tools actually offer.

📊 How to Use a Gantt Chart in Project Management

Managing projects, timelines, and resources isn’t easy, especially as you scale your operations. Some projects inevitably get delayed, budgets go over, and resources are poorly allocated – we’ve all been there.

If you’re regularly managing projects, you’ll know how important it is to manage your resources – both human and non-people ones. But allocating resources, assigning responsibilities, and tracking progress require visibility, structure, and careful planning. And that’s why many project managers turn to a Gantt chart.

📈  How to Use a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in Project Management

If you’re looking for a structured method for organizing your projects, outlining workflows, assigning responsibilities, and estimating resource requirements, a work breakdown structure (WBS) might be just what you need. A WBS helps you visualize your project, assess its scope, and decompose your core deliverables into smaller, more manageable tasks. 

In this article, we’ll explore how you can create and manage work breakdown structures for all your projects. 

📂 Achieving Customer-Centricity With CRM and Project Management Integration

Many businesses claim to be customer-centric, but what does that actually mean in practice?

Very simply, a business is customer-centric if it puts customers at the forefront of everything it does. So, systems and processes are designed to help serve customers better, customer feedback is collected and analyzed to drive internal change, and you’ll have a formal strategy for cultivating customer satisfaction.

As you’d expect, achieving this level of customer-centricity requires a fair bit of time and resource investment. You’ll need to put the right systems in place, nurture a customer-first culture, and leverage technology to put customers at the center of your business.

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🖐 Avoid These 5 Fatal Project Management Mistakes Like the Plague

The number of projects that fail every year might surprise you. Project Management Institute’s research revealed that around 50% of projects failed every year from the years 2019-2021 globally every year (although only 12-15% were complete failures).

But what’s causing all these projects to fail, and are your projects at risk? If you’re making one of the following five fatal mistakes, they might be. 

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👍 Popular Project Management Methodologies: Compared

Successful project management is essential to managing your business, but if you talk to any project manager, they’ll tell you that planning, juggling responsibilities, and quickly responding to bottlenecks isn’t straightforward. How do you define the project’s scope? Who’s in charge of what? What stages does the project need to go through? 

These are just some questions that you’ll need to answer for each project that comes in – and that’s why we have project management methodologies and frameworks. 

But there isn’t a single “best” framework to follow, and depending on your organisation’s size, how it operates, and its industry, you might need to consider more than one. And that’s why we’re going to discuss the most popular project management methodologies and how you can choose the right one for your organisation. 

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🦾 The Use of AI in Project Management

Project management tools have come a long way from spreadsheets and bulletin boards. As project management platforms have matured, they’ve helped us improve the way we organise our work, allocate resources, manage budgets and expenditures, and evaluate progress and performance. 

Now, with the advent of AI in project management, businesses are unlocking greater return on investment (ROI) and reaching new heights of productivity. In this article, we’ll discuss AI’s potential, its impact on the way we work, and the changing role of project managers in an AI-first future.

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🤖 The 10 Best Project Management Tools with AI

As AI technologies become mainstream, software solution providers are integrating AI into their existing systems to improve productivity and deliver superior user experiences. 

Artificial intelligence has a very broad scope, though, and AI tools range from text generation tools (trained on large language models) to process optimisation technologies and forecasting systems. So, to help you choose the right project management tools with AI, we’ve compiled a list of top PM software that leverage AI in different ways.

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👨‍💻 The 15 Best Simple Project Management Software

Spreadsheets and Google Docs are great for small-scale collaboration, but what do you do when your business grows? Teams expand, there are more projects to manage, and uh-oh, you forgot to invoice your clients on time. 

At this stage, simple project management software becomes invaluable. It helps you track each project’s progress, assign and manage responsibilities, and organize team collaboration. So, to help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the 15 best project management (PM) software. 

Our rundown includes the simplest tools, more feature-rich options, and the most advanced PM tools. But before we get to those, let’s cover the essential features that any good PM software should have.

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👌 6 Benefits of Agile Project Management

Agile project management has quickly become the most popular project management methodology globally – for example it’s now used by over 70% of U.S. companies. Agile emphasizes optimizing your project’s development process by eliminating waste, empowering team members, and prioritizing consistent, continuous improvement.

It’s encouraging employees to take more ownership and responsibility, and to create deliverables that align with your stakeholder’s expectations. If you’re interested in learning more about Agile’s potential, read on to learn about its benefits, how it compares to the popular Waterfall methodology, and why you need to consider scaling with agile project management software.

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